Safer pet products
All of us are painfully aware of the efforts needed to keep food systems safe.
A recall of harmful product is all it would take to damage a brand’s quality reputation and ultimately cripple sales.
Prevention
Most brands and production facilities are proactively taking steps to reduce potential product problems. The presence of good quality systems and standards coupled with regular audits and mock recalls are necessary steps in protecting a product and ultimately the business. Most retailers require third-party certification (A.I.B., GFSI, etc.) before acceptance of a new product or supply.
The launch of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in the US has led to similar programmes in other countries being started, all with the goal of government intervention in food, pet and animal plants worldwide. Every group involved with ingredients, shipments, production and retail is now bound by new regulations.
The FDA declared in their FSMA documents that this is “the most sweeping reform of our food safety laws in more than seventy years”. The overall concern was the millions of US people sick with food-borne illness each year. Addressing the causes due to handling of foods, storage, turnover and preparation seemed to be secondary. These issues are addressed in pet foods in detailed feeding instructions. Nevertheless, FSMA was signed into law on 4 January 2011 to “ensure the US food supply”. The FDA believes that prevention standards and procedures will be the answer to food safety and results are only as good as compliance.
Zero-tolerance
At the heart of FSMA was a political desire that wanted a ‘zero-tolerance’ food system. There had been recalls of spinach with E. coli in 2006. This was followed by cases of botulism in some canned chili in 2007. Many consumers remember the Salmonella contaminated peanut butter in 2009.
Could these facilities have done better? Unequivocally the answer is yes. Would more government regulation and inspection have stopped these incidents? The answer to that question is much less definite since the FDA had inspected the peanut butter plant multiple times during the year of the recall.
Closer to home, to the pet food industry, was the illegal use of melamine to elevate protein content in certain ingredients in 2007. It is hard to see how crimes like this could have been caught with new standards and regulations. All of us want safer and higher quality products. But we must not just over-react to a problem without the facts.
- How far do we have to go with quality and safety?
- Is perfection (zero-tolerance) really possible?
- Since we cannot be perfect, how much risk can we accept?